This is just completely retarded and incompetent. I know these problems are an upstream heritage from GNOME Shell. But now that Cinnamon is a stand-alone product, I hope they will finally get around to fix this unbelievable problem.

When you reinstall all your software packages back to a convenient state, Linux Mint 16 boots faster than it takes the first time to open the menu.

Okay that's not true. But this delay is still pure BS. I can't believe there are devs out there in the Shell team who are just happy with this.

Can I also add that ploughing through message after message that implies "I don't have this problem, so I can't help", or "I don't have this problem, it must be very unusual" or 'I don't have this problem - are you sure you are not imagining it" is not actually very helpful at all.

For those of us who DO have this problem, it is 100% pain, EVEN if we are only 1% of the Cinnamon population, and it seems that in fact it IS quite common.

I would GUESS that for those who do not have the problem, there is a background process working that the menu display calls on to display the current menu state and for the rest of us, for some reason it has to build from scratch, maybe because something installed prevents that from working properly. For example, I have the chinese language input method installed - which interacts with d-bus. Not saying this is it, but maybe something like it.

What worked for me (mint Petra + Cinnamon) laptop= dell vostro 1500 core 2 (old and slow) was to right click/configure on the mint logo (menu logo button) and UNCHECK "Open the menu when I move the mouse over it". Before I unchecked it I set the delay time to 0 from 750ms just as an added measure. I actually went back and unchecked every item checked later. But unchecking the mouse over took my menu delay from about 5 seconds down to almost instant (maybe 50ms now).

I had this issue as well as very bad performance on games. For instance tux racer was unplayable. I have a quad core amd machine with 8gb of ram, and using onboard radeon 3000 graphics. Mate, xfce and KDE all work as they should, I've settled on mate. I hope this issue is resolved because I really like the features and look of cinnamon and would go back as soon as it works properly. Has anybody noted the same problem using LMDE or is this isolated to the ubuntu based version?

I was testing the main menu of some Desktop Environments (Mate and Xfce) to find out why their menus are so much faster than Cinnamon's menu. Well, I think I found one of the possible reasons for it. Under Mater or Xfce the menu opens just by a mouse button press, I mean, the menu opens even before the user releases the mouse button. Under Cinnamon the menu only opens after the user releases the mouse button. In my opinion, this contributes substantially to the overall sensation of slowness. I know this may appear to be a negligible detail, but trust me, it makes a huge difference.

So my suggestion:

Make the menu open immediately when the user presses the mouse button. Don't wait for it to open only when the user releases the pressed button .

This is FINALLY fixed! In Linux Mint Cinnamon 17 x64, the menu is instant! Even after I installed a hundred new packages.

Very nice work. This is what would get accepted into "acceptable for mainline use" according to my standards. It is unfortunate that this is typical for Linux: A huge usability bug in core functionality was fixed in three years.

Now I can finally recommend the beautiful Linux Mint Cinnamon to everyone randomly during every awkward silence in any random conversation!